oslo qa hackathon day 1

Today was the first day of work on the Oslo QA Hackathon. Lots of stuff went
on, and the small fraction I was able to witness was very exciting. TAP seems
to be getting a lot of great discussion, and not only are great feature ideas
being fleshed out, many of them are then being put aside for thought before
being blindly implemented. This is nothing but good.

David Golden, Jonas Nielsen, and I worked on CPAN::Reporter, dealing with the
problem of CPAN tester results being submissible only via email, which is often
not sendable by machines installing modules. By the end of the hacking day, we
had a test result going into a mailbox using a HTTP-to-cpantesters gateway.
Hopefully that will be on the CPAN in the next few days, and in use shortly
thereafter (or before)!

Oslo is a nice city, and quite pleasant to look at. On Friday, our pre-hacking
day, many of us went over to the Vigeland Sculpture
Park, which was fantastic. I got
a lot of good photos
but they need editing and commentary. It's also an expensive city. How
expensive? Incredibly expensive. I mean that quite literally: it is hard to
believe how expensive things are.

Last night, I got two pints of Newcastle and a pub-quality burger. It cost
about $52, American. A bottle of soda costs about $3.50. If I recall
correctly, a one way ticket on the streetcar is about $8. Tonight, I got
treated to two beers, which I tried to appreciate, given their value!

Tomorrow (actually, tonight) I hope to start actual work on something that got
a lot of whiteboarding today: a system for storing distribution-related
metadata. It's hard to explain without going on and on, so I'll try again
tomorrow, maybe with some diagrams or at least more time taken to explain it.
For now, it's just exciting, and I hope to either feel sure that it's useful
(and finish it) or that it's not (and give up and move onto something better).

Finally, I will once again say that one of the best parts of any get-together
like this is that it's fantastic to meet people with whom I've worked for
years. Sometimes it's just pleasant, and sometimes it's great to find out that
people who have seemed quite standoffish or distant are just great, dedicated,
pleasant people (just like I am).

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